1. A large and mysterious world that lives not around the main character, but by itself. And the hero must investigate, explore the world, to understand his life and to survive in it.

Each game step calculated entire whole world map, not just an area around the hero.

The whole world lives regardless of the protagonist. Trees grow and dies, floods, breeding and dying animals, in the depths of the earth erupt volcanoes, earthquakes shifting layers of earth, pressure and temperature are produced minerals, underground creatures built the treasury, and mined ores.

All of this is already in the game, but should be even greater.

2. The gameplay is basically "the search and survive". The player goes through the caves and searching, searching. And sometimes it runs on who found it.

Crafting and blocks set are present in game, but these features is not the main gameplay features.

I had noticed that the game moves as the keys are pressed, as the alternative of the world moving and living without the player input, is this permanent? The rocks and trees grew and fell only when I moved the player.

This is extremely beautiful! I see many miner games made but this one seems to have the potential to surpass the popular 2 titles which don't need mentioning here.

It's extremely easy on the eyes as well.

« Last Edit: June 13, 2012, 10:31:19 AM by # »

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looks good; will the game be *purely* sandbox or will you add some challenges eventually? i tend to not like pure sandbox games without any goals at all. i like having at least some goal, even if it's just something like "make a city as big as possible" as in sim city, or "evolve your species to reach space" like in sim earth / spore

@# -- that's standard for roguelikes. time only passes when the player does something. it's the same thing in dungeon crawl stone soup for instance.

I had noticed that the game moves as the keys are pressed, as the alternative of the world moving and living without the player input, is this permanent? The rocks and trees grew and fell only when I moved the player.

Yes, this is default regime of this game. But, if you want to spend a game time, you may press a space button, and game regime will switch to continuous time.

looks good; will the game be *purely* sandbox or will you add some challenges eventually?

Yes, yes! Some challenges is only planned, and some challenges is already present. Global challenge on game map is to build the between worlds teleport and go to the next map. For do this, player need to solve many intermediate challenges: a) find ores and create items, b) find artifacts, c) find materials to build between-world teleport, d) stay alive .

Global game challenges now I am not select, but they are will be preset, I think.

this game has tons of potential. Looking forward to seeing where you go with it.

Most of the features on this first map has already been done. Next, I will focus on creating new worlds, where the player will get after the first world. In the new world, which is logical, plan new features and mechanisms of life.

But _this_ world is almost ready to start, so what to expect from the game, you can already see.

Looks beautiful! Is it all cellular automata? And do the elements of the world only interact with neighbouring elements?

No, the world blocks have very more complex mechanics. Creatures, for example. They are walking around, run to or from enemyes, sentient beings is build tunnels, houses and treasures. And they do not build on a fixed schedule. So, you can see, that is not possible on simple cellular automat.

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Today I make a more shadows from the light blocks. I think, that is better. This is small screenshot: new shadows on left part

It's looking really good. The background art style for some reason reminds me of the old Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games. The sort of digitalized painting look. Sadly it was too choppy on my machine to really give it a go.

No, the world blocks have very more complex mechanics. Creatures, for example. They are walking around, run to or from enemyes, sentient beings is build tunnels, houses and treasures. And they do not build on a fixed schedule. So, you can see, that is not possible on simple cellular automat.

Am I correct in assuming that every tile is an object? I get why you can't do agent-based behaviour on the GPU, but maybe you can still let it compute part of the physics of the simple objects in the world.

Another thing you can "optimise", since it's turn based, is to pre-compute the parts of the next turn that will happen regardless of player input. But maybe you already do that.

This is a turn-based game, so it was planned. To give control to the player - a step should not be quick. But the other side - yes, performance problem is present. Not sure of success, but try to slightly improve the situation.

Another thing you can "optimise", since it's turn based, is to pre-compute the parts of the next turn that will happen regardless of player input. But maybe you already do that.

I tried to do so. In pauses world calculating ahead, and when player start moving after pause, the game run faster. But a couple of seconds, and game is slow again. These changes in velocity were not pleasant, as experience has shown.

I get why you can't do agent-based behaviour on the GPU, but maybe you can still let it compute part of the physics of the simple objects in the world.

I think, I am not so skilled for such GPU calculating. All game graphics is soft-rendered, by the way. In other words, all graphics calculating on a CPU now.

Well, truth be told, neither am I . But I do understand the general idea: instead of treating a texture as a picture, treat it as a 2 (or 1 or 3) dimensional array. Use fragment shaders to calculate stuff with that data. Especially with modern OpenGL you can do all kinds of stuff not directly related to graphics - treating a texture as a look-up table for example (see linked tutorial), or doing particle physics.

Another thing you can "optimise", since it's turn based, is to pre-compute the parts of the next turn that will happen regardless of player input. But maybe you already do that.

I tried to do so. In pauses world calculating ahead, and when player start moving after pause, the game run faster. But a couple of seconds, and game is slow again. These changes in velocity were not pleasant, as experience has shown.